It’s easy to love being an entrepreneur when things are going well. When things go well, it’s easy be motivated and get your team to feel like they’re on cloud nine. When things go bad, it’s not that simple. There’s a lot that goes into building a successful business. Motivation is a huge factor. While it’s a ridiculous expectation to remain positive at all times, there are strategies to live by to at least come close. These will allow entrepreneurs to stay motivated during tough times.

Practice Self Care

Especially during busy seasons, it’s easy to get lost in emails and chasing customers. With tedious tasks and putting out little fires everywhere, it can become easy to start hating the business. When it gets overwhelming, it’s time for a break. Self care is essential for survival. Business hours have to be set and honored. That means if the business hours are from 9 to 5, no emails or phone calls are tended to after or before those hours. During the down time find a hobby, have a spa day or spend time with family.

Maintain Human Connection

Everyone desires human contact. With the pandemic of 2020, a lot of human connection slowly reduced or diminished almost entirely. With this hurdle, it’s important to maintain some type of communication. Many organizations are forced to come up with alternate solutions to keeping the barriers from destroying their business. There are tons of tools that can be used in doing this. Using communication tools like Asana will allow employees to discuss projects and know what the other person is doing. Face to face is also necessary. Many companies are using Zoom for those meetings that simply cannot be condensed into one email.

Search for Inspiration

Inspiration won’t always just fall from the sky. It’s important to be intentional with staying inspired. Luckily tools like social media exists. While it’s a double edged sword causing a lot of discouragement and sadness with cyber bullying and propaganda, there’s an entire world of motivation that can be found on social platforms. Begin sorting through the feed and saving video posts that motivate. Follow Thought Leaders in similar fields to stay in the know with what other like minded individuals are doing to stay positive.

Focus on the Bigger Picture

At the end of the day, decide to remember what inspired the business to begin with. There was a point in time when the goal was to be happy and not to make money. What inspired the dream to become reality? What motivated the push through when it seemed impossible to get the business off the ground? Even the greater companies need to take time to find encouragement again. Continue to practice self care. Push for human connection even during times when it’s extremely difficult. Be intentional with finding inspiration, applying it personally and professionally. Above all, focus on what matters most. By practicing these things we find that motivation has never left. It just needed a little nudge to spark back up again.